GIPHY's new Black History Month series celebrates hair, love and activism

GIFs are inescapable, infiltrating almost every way we communicate in 2017. And now, with a new series from GIPHY, the world can choose from a much more inclusive array of options.

Timed with Black History Month, GIPHY has made a dedicated effort to provide users with GIFs showing the black American experience. From iconic civil rights activists to #BlackGirlMagic, the GIF search engine is honoring black culture by creating and curating GIFs that help fill a gaping hole in representation online — this February and beyond.

GIPHY's culture editor, Jasmyn Lawson — who, for the record, pronounces GIF with a hard "g" — is one of the driving forces behind the effort.

"I knew personally, just being a black woman, that if I'm going to work here and use the product, I want to use GIFs that represent me," Lawson said.

She explained that her initial drive to see more diversity came from searching through regular results, like "hello" or "facepalm." The results showed mostly white people. Lawson wanted to offer users more inclusive GIFs that could represent the many facets of being a person of color.

In the first of several series, GIPHY kicked off Black History Month with original, illustrated GIFs highlighting important work by black leaders. The company introduced animated portraits of icons like Toni Morrison, John Lewis, Shirley Chisholm and James Baldwin that quickly spread across Facebook and Twitter.

The GIPHY Studios team illustrated some of the GIFs, while others were curated by editors who sort through images and assign tags (like, "awkward" or "shrug"), adding terms specifically for Black History Month.

For others, like the original Black Hair series, the company specifically hired black artists to illustrate portrayals of black culture and hair beyond just aesthetics.

"We talk a lot about black hair in terms of style and the way we wear our hair, but we don't necessarily talk about the nuanced experiences we have dealing with hair," Lawson said. "It's a big part of our culture."

She cited bonnet problems, braid struggles and barber loyalty as a few examples.

Black Girl Magic was one of Lawson's first passion projects — a collection that launched last year with the GIPHY Studios team, featuring about 300 GIFs of different black women of various skin tones, hair textures and body size.

This month, just in time for Valentine's Day, Lawson was able to put similar energy behind curating images of black love — and they go well beyond straight, non-trans couples.

GIPHY Culture Editor Jasmyn Lawson

Image: Martha Tesema / Mashable

Seeing regular representation of various people of color in traditional media can be a slow moving train, so diversity in something as common as a GIF has instant and powerful results.

Whether it's through the spectrum of ages, body positivity, body hair, sexual orientation or, as Lawson said, "all those random things that make up who we are and our identities," these curated GIFs attempt to represent as many people as possible. And their effect has definitely been noticed.

"I look on the internet and I can visually see the impact those GIFs have — I see people using them," Lawson said.

For Lawson, the results of the series have been overwhelming, and shed light on the need for projects like this.

"People are cringing for this representation of themselves," she explained. "It takes forever to get a series made or things to get green-lit ... For me I can be like, 'Oh you want to see yourself? Let me make that GIF,' and bow — it's out there."

The work to diversify the GIF archive may be underway, but it's far from over — and definitely won't end on Feb. 28.

"For me, black history is never ending. Even now we're still making history," she said, mentioning pioneers like Viola Davis, Simone Biles and Chance the Rapper.

More history means even more GIFs to share for the culture, and we're not mad about that in the slightest.

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